Morley, Madeleine. Eye on Design: Celebrating the African-American Practitioners Absent From Way Too Many Classroom Lectures (2018)
Munro, Silas.  Eye on Design: Typography as a Radical Act in an Industry Ever-dominated by White Men (2019) 
Rawsthorn, Alice. NYTimes: Design Gets More Diverse (2011)

Question / Prompts

  • How do we change the commercial design field to include a diversity of voices and visions?
  • What will the commercial design field and the study of design history look like in 20 years?

Response

To include a diversity of voice and visions in the commercial design field, we have to think about it as advertising a product itself. Now how would a graphic designer handle this situation as if it were a client? We could have to use all the means to inform as many people as we can about designing. This is making use of all the social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and trying to make a catchy hashtag. We could use our design skills to make posts on those social media sites to get more people interested. The way I would do it is to make a short video showing all the good aspects of designing and pay for that video to be advertised on those social media sites. This way if there is someone who has not heard of graphic design then they would still see it because it pops up in their feed as ads. So in turn more people would see it and would lead to diversity since a wide variety of people would see this online. That’s just one way on how I would go about it to bring diversity to the commercial design field.       

As for how the commercial design field would look in 20 years there will be a will either a completely new style for advertising or a rehash of an older style. Today the style that many companies go for is minimalism you can see that over time with their logos and commercials. Before in the ’80s and ’90s, everything was more in your face but things have calmed down since then. So if we were to continue down this path then for the iPhone 23 Apple is just going the show the phone and the commercial will end. So in 20 years, I think we’re just going to see a new style of design that uses aspects of old styles over the years because I don’t think things can get much simpler than they are right now. Also, there will be a new generation of designers by that time so it’s their visions that we will end up seeing.     

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